Ultra-processed food, it almost sounds like it’s toxic, but how bad is it really? And what is it anyway?
Roughly speaking, you can say that ultra-processed food contains at least five ingredients that you usually do not have at home and has undergone processing that you cannot easily imitate at home. So an apple is unprocessed, chips are ultra-processed. There are also foods in between, such as bread and butter, which we call processed.
About 70 percent of the products in the supermarket are ultra-processed. And the Dutch are also enthusiasts: 61 percent of our food falls into the ultra-processed category. This makes us leaders in the world.
But how bad is that? That depends on who you ask. The fact is that ultra-processed food is rarely healthy. It usually falls into the category of chips, cookies and candy. It contains few healthy nutrients and you can easily consume too much. But researcher Guido Camps from Wageningen University believes that you should not ‘demonize’ ultra-processed food. “All ultra-processed foods are lumped together, as if whole wheat bread from the supermarket is unhealthier than a homemade apple turnover,” he says in de Volkskrant.
Just too much
Most ultra-processed products contain few beneficial nutrients, but this sometimes also applies to unprocessed foods. Camps: “If you make two kilos of fruit into a smoothie in the blender, you will consume much more of it than regular fruit. That smoothie gives you a minimal feeling that you have eaten something, while it contains an enormous amount of sugar.”
According to him, the danger lies much more in eating speed and portions that are too large. “You don’t overeat because of some magical effect of ultra-processed foods, but simply because the food is easier to get rid of.”
Camps believes that the focus on ultra-processed food distracts from the real problem. “Like that unhealthy food is available all around us, and that the food industry is allowed to imply on the packaging that, for example, breakfast cereals full of salt and sugar are healthy thanks to ‘six added vitamins.’
Bron(nen): De Volkskrant
2023-10-03 16:24:06
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